The present invention relates generally to control of application interactions, and more particularly, to a system and method for graphical representation and control of relationships between a computer device application and other applications and/or computer device resources.
It is problematic to troubleshoot relationships between applications on a computer device and to comprehend application interactions with one another and with computer device resources. For example, a smartphone or tablet that has one or more applications may cause undesirable effects such as: sending physical location information to unauthorized cloud applications; accessing personal contact lists; consuming a large proportion of network interface capacity; consuming a larger proportion of storage; accessing other applications or data within those applications; and causing other applications to activate hardware resources. Present methods for visualizing application interactions are limited to a few rudimentary methods for representing battery usage.
Relationships between entities, such as applications and system resources (e.g., memory, central processing unit, battery, and system devices) in an operating system may be controlled through the operating system security models and may involve some type of data store that records decisions on access to those resources. In the case of applications, this data store is often populated by decisions made by the device owner/administrator through explicit requests for sharing of information between applications and/or resources through a user prompt and approval (e.g., “allow this application to access your address book?”). These systems allow these decisions/settings to be changed using basic but cumbersome processes of selecting the application and manually turning off or on the permissions for each attribute/share request.
Certain applications, such as some social media applications, allow a user to control some interactions of the application with other applications and/or resources. However, such control is limited to only select interactions, and it may not be possible to verify that the user's control selection is being implemented by the application.